Judaism
Judges: a Book of the Persian Period 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 15, 2001
The Early Judges
In Judges 3:7-11, Othniel is the “saviour” sent to deliver Israel from the hands of Cushan-rishathaim, the king of Mesopotamia, in short, the king of Persia. This might specifically have been Cambyses, the son of Cyrus who conquered Egypt. The mention of the “sons of Israel” and “Israel” in these stories is considered an anachronism created by later editing, the stories supposedly being before there was any state of Israel, a product of the division of the united monarchy of David and Solomon, according to the biblical myth. Seen properly, they are not anachronisms, and it is the artificial retrogression of the stories that seems to make them anachronistic.
Othniel had the Spirit of the Lord, showing it is later than the Persian conquest. The inhabitants of Abarnahara, the Hebrews, learnt from the Persians that people were subject to influences from good and from evil spirits. Othniel ruled for the legendary forty years, but each time a good judge died, the people reverted to their Baals and Asherahs and God got angry. Among the punishers are the Amalekites, always supposed to be Arabs, but the name suggests they are the “King’s Men”, Persian policemen or officials.
In Judges 3:15, the next saviour is Ehud with a scheming plot to assassinate the king of Moab by thrusting him through with a sword hidden under Ehud’s robe, on the unexpected side because he was left-handed. Moab was subdued for two generations (80 years). The city of paalms (Jericho) appears again though it had supposedly been knocked down by Joshua’s holy trumpets only a few decades before.
The “sculptured stones” or “quarries” of Judges 3:19,26 are euphemisms for the henge or standing stones which made Gilgal a noted sanctuary. The name of the obese enemy, Eglon, is “calf” and that is what it was. Ehud stabbed a sacred cow—not a human king but a divine king—a god. In conjunction with the previous pun suggesting Cambyses, we see here a recollection of anti-Persian, specifically anti-Cambyses propaganda. Cambyses is said by his Egyptian and Greek enemies to have killed the Apis bull, as well as his own brother, so he is a double villain. Curiously the average lifetime of an Apis bull was 18 years, the length of time Eglon was supposed to have ruled Israel.
In Judges 3:31 is a brief mention of another Judge, obviously inserted. Shamgar killed 600 Philistines with an ox-goad. He is a son of Anath, the consort of El. He is plainly the sun god, Shamesh or Samson, given a slightly variant name.
Deborah
In Judges 4:1 to 5:31 appears two accounts of the claim to fame of the judge, Deborah, the first in prose then one in verse. Many commentators declare the poem to be the oldest text in the bible because of its obscure words and its apparently northern dialect, but the fact that it is a dialect could be entirely the reason for its obscure words. One wonders whether some of its difficult words could be Iranian. It certainly has more Aramaic words than classical Hebrew, suggesting youth rather than antiquity. Scholarly opinion is coming round to seeing it as not so old. The mention of Sinai (Jg 5:5) is added by an harmonizing editor.
The king of the Canaanites is called Jabin, but there is no evidence that the Canaanites were ever united under a single king. The Canaanites would often call their god their king. Thus a Phœnician god was called Melqart, meaning King of the City, and Moloch might have been the same, or similar god. So Jabin was possibly a Canaanite god not a Canaanite king. But, in the poem, Jabin does not appear at all and the Canaanite king is Sisera, who is the Canaanite general in the prose version. Sisera is taken to mean a youth but it is not a Semitic name and appears only one other place—in the genealogies of Ezra-Nehemiah as the patriarch of a returning family. Jael can be read as “Yehouah is El” (or God) and Jabin as “Yehouah is Son”.
The hints suggest an allegory of a struggle between two factions, one wanting Yehouah to be seen as the High God and the other wanting Yehouah to remain as he is in the Canaanite pantheon, the son of El—so El remains the High God. It is not uncommon for sons of gods to replace their fathers in mythology. Jabin is defeated and the “Yehouah is God” faction succeed. The importance of women in the story might suggest that women favoured the “Yehouah is God” faction.
Deborah seems to be an Indo-European word meaning the “Goddess is Our Lady”, or “The Divine Lady”. “Deborah” now means “bee” but that might be because she was the mother goddess, as Judges openly declares:
The leaders ceased in Israel. They ceased until I, Deborah, arose. I arose as a mother in Israel.Jg 5:7 Lit
The attendants of mother goddesses were called bees as they were for Cybele and Diana. The Goddess Neith, one of the more important deities in Lower Egypt where the bee was the symbol of kingship, had a temple known as “the House of the Bee”.
Von Soden (The Ancient Orient) is categoric that, although the designation “judge” was granted to goddesses, not a single instance of a practicing female judge has ever been found in any ancient near eastern text. The case of Deborah, in the bible, is therefore so unique, it suggests that Deborah was indeed a goddess and not a human woman.
She is described in Judges 4:5 as if she were an idol or standing stone beneath a palm tree called “The Palm of Deborah” in Bethel. She could not have been in the Judaean hills originally if she lived beneath a palm, unless an oak was meant, but she could have been at Jericho. There is another Deborah in the Jewish scriptures. She is a nurse, the nurse of Rebekah. She died and was buried beneath a tree named Allon-bachuth (Gen 35:8), the “Tree of Weeping” or the “Oak of Weeping” also in Bethel. The Hebrew word “allon” can mean any large tree, or an oak tree specifically.
Demeter played the role of the nurse to the infant Iacchus. The story of Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, who died after Jacob had set up the altar at Bethel, and was therefore presumably nurse to the twins Jacob and Esau, sounds like a remnant of a story like that of Demeter making the child Brimo, who is Bacchus or Iacchus, immortal. Iacchus is obviously Jacob. Iacchus is Dionysus and is also Dendrites, “Of Trees”.
Neither prose nor poem is easy to understand. One suspects the earthly struggle between gods was cast as a cosmic battle but later was brought back to earth in a particular locality, not convincingly. Megiddo and Kadesh are both mentioned, the scenes of legendary battles. Particularly in the poem, Deborah sounds like a war goddess, like Anahita, and significantly she permits “new gods” to be chosen (Jg 5:8). Neith’s symbol was a pair of crossed arrows over a shield, and her role is described in the Hymn to Neith preserved at the Esna temple, where she procreates the god, Ra, who is also called Khepri in the morning and Atum in the evening.
Of course, Yehouah is eternal so cannot have a mother, and it seems here that the bible has an old myth about a war in heaven and the creation of a new good god, but the god has had to be omitted. In the Babylonian Creation Myth, in which Marduk defeats Tiamat in the heavenly battle, Marduk is assisted by the Great Goddess Aruru who eventually makes Gilgamesh and his companion, Enkidu. Possibly Deborah is a version of the Babylonian goddess, Aruru, identified also with the Egyptian goddess Neith. She appears again as Aseneth, the wife of Joseph, who seems to be Horakhty, the morning sun.
Deborah might have stood for a women’s movement. They were devoted to a goddess who refused to accept El as the almighty god, preferring to elevate his son, Yehouah, whom they held in higher regard, perhaps because they associated Yehouah with Tammuz. The final sentence is a description of Mithras in its mention of the sun, “might” and particularly “friends”. Perhaps Mithras was seen as the Persian version of Tammuz.
The women were to be disappointed because when Yehouah was made into the local Ahuramazda, he was recast as El, not Mithras, but was even less sympathetic than the High God, because he took more interest in his Chosen People than El ever did, and he was jealous! It took Christianity to restore Mithras as the popular Son in the form of Jesus. Deborah’s husband’s name, Lappidoth, means “torches”, or “lightnings”, and Barak means “lightning”. They are references to a sky god like Zeus, though the torches could be the upturned and downturned torches of the torchbearers in Mithraic iconography, standing for opposites like day and night, summer and winter and life and death.
It seems that the aim of the author was to cast old gods as earthly heroes, so that the One God could be one only while the people could still respect their old gods as heroes. Christians have done the same with some saints.
Gideon
In Judges 6:1 to 8:28 is the story of Gideon who is a son of Joash and one of the sons of Ezra because he is an Abiezrite (“My father is Ezra”). To be an Abiezrite is not necessarily to be a real son or even a descendent, but to be in the brotherhood of Ezraites—the followers of Ezra. Joash is Joshua, so here are references to the occasion when Ezra returned and read out the law, and Joshua was mythically the first High Priest of the second temple. The oppressors in this story however are the Midianites (Medes), the Amalekites (King’s men) and the men of the east, references at this time, to the Persian conquerors, who come up with their cattle, like locusts. In Judges 6:33, they are encamped in the Valley of Jezreel, a mythical name for Israel.
The implication is that here is a story from the side of the Am ha Eretz, some of whom took to banditry rather than accept the new cult and the Persian rule. Later in Judges, Jephthah is also depicted as being a bandit. Addressing the angel of the Lord in Judges 6:13, Gideon expresses his skepticism of the Persian cult and its propaganda:
Oh my Lord, if the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us? and where be all his miracles which our fathers told us of, saying, Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt? but now the Lord hath forsaken us, and delivered us into the hands of the Midianites.
Gideon is so skeptical he even insists on twice testing the Lord, an utterly forbidden act (Dt 6:16) that must show this story to have been a mockery originally. The battle that Gideon wins is also a mockery, making out that the enemy are scared out of their wits, and 135,000 Medes and Persians are killed and scattered by 300 opponents who survive without loss. Doubtless Gidean led a small band of outlaws and his enemies have been multiplied.
Yet the sacrifices offered by Gideon are Persian, the meat being boiled not roast. The Angel of the Lord is present at the sacrifice and rises up to heaven with the flames, which are therefore seen as the good mediator between earth and heaven. The two supposed leaders of the Medes killed at first are scavengers, the Raven (Oreb) and the Wolf (Zeeb), animals that picked at carcasses left out, Persian fashion, to be picked dry.
So, what seems to have been a Samarian story of a bandit hero’s exploits against the Median oppressors has been turned round by an editor who makes him acceptable by destroying altars to Baal and Asherah (Jg 6:25), Canaanite gods, which he does by night and without the knowledge of his family, showing clearly he was of the Canaanite breed. The altar is then dedicated to the new god by sacrificing a bull, in the Persian saviour’s fashion. Gideon therefore becomes Mithras whose sacrifice brings good into the world. The Canaanites want to kill Gideon for his desecration of their altars but Joash (Joshua) tells them to let the god fight for himself, a lesson that all defenders of gods should learn, but none do.
Now appears some confusion and curious folk etymology. Because Joash has said that the Baal should fight for itself, Gideon is called Jerubaal, which supposedly means “Let Baal Fight”. In fact, it looks like a corruption or a pun. It is really Zerubabel. In Haggai and Zechariah, Joshua and Zerubabel are linked so inseparably that they might have been originally different titles of the same man, so it is is curious that obvious corruptions of Joshua and Zerubabel should be linked here. Plainly it was Joash who said, “let Baal Fight”, and he it should be who is given the nickname, but it is transferred to Gideon, and an editor has to make it clear (Jg 7:1).
Only 300 men chase off a large army by making strange noises in the night! The places of flight mentioned in the stories are unknown, as are many places in the scriptural stories, though biblicists will identify every place mentioned.
J Pedersen sees the Jerubaal story as relating a conflict between supporters of Yehouah and Baal over a sanctuary eventually falling to Yehouah. He also sees Judges as fragments of legends telling of local wars and the feats of local heroes after the settlement, but the settlement was in the Persian period not in the late bronze or early iron ages.
The compiler of this eclectic collection of stories makes many allusions to Exodus and uses many of its constructions. One editor calls the people the sons of Israel while the other simply calls them Israel, and the first seems to be moralistic in blaming God’s reactions on to the people’s failings while the other is more generous. These might be the different attitudes of the original writer who was sympathetic to Israel, while the later editor was sympathetic to the colonists and blamed the people for God’s actions.
In Judges 8:14, a captured young man is expected to be able to write and writes down the names of officials. Today, this would not be surprising but in 1200 BC few people could write. It suggests the story is much later than it purports to be. The crescents on the camels in Judges 8:21 might suggest moon worshippers.
Here Gideon, who seems to have the name or title Zerubabel, refuses to be made king whereas, to judge by Haggai, Zerubabel was made king. Either way, the suggestion is that Zerubabel is a rebel against the Persians. Gideon is happy to leave god as the ruler but nevertheless makes a golden idol that the people worship at Ophrah. Gideon is depicted as having 70 sons, implying that Gideon himself is the High God, or perhaps his earthly agent, because 70 was supposed to have been all the nations of the earth. El similarly had 70 sons, and this appears in Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where Yehouah is one of the national gods, sons of El.
Abimelech
Despite all these sons, Gideon has a special son born at Shechem called Abimelech, meaning “My Father is King”. The people returned to apostasy immediately worshipping Baal-berith, a god whose name is “Lord of the Covenant!” In Genesis 35:4, Jacob received his allegiance to the “God of the Covenant” at Shechem. The covenant was that made by Joshua (Josh 24:25; Dt 27) who is the mythologized priest of Haggai and Zechariah that introduced the new god—Ezra. The whole story seems to have begun as a tale of the Am ha Eretz struggling against the Persian colonists, but later reworked to fit the established view. Shechem was probably the site of the original worship of the new Persian inspired god, or perhaps was the first of several that were originally set up, before a decision was taken to centre activity on Jerusalem. Abimelech was meant to stand for the loyal followers of the Persian king, and therefore of the imported god, Yehouah, whose first sanctuary was at Shechem.
The story of Abimelech in Judges 9:1-6 has the hallmark of reworked mythology. Essentially it is how the people of Shechem who had worshipped amother goddess and various baals were beguiled into supporting Abimelech, the one god against the many gods. Abimelech was made king at Shechem. It seems though that the people of Shechem, after three years turned to another god, Gaal. Now Gaal, unless it is a deliberate corruption of baal, means beetle, so might have been an Egyptian deity associated with the scarab beetle. Equally it might be a corruption of Gaddel meaning “El is Good Fortune”, as possibly Gideon is too. The people had not been impressed by their three years of devotion to Abimelech and were much happier under the aegis of the Beetle, and again voices urged the people to fight the Persian invaders. Zebul is, of course, another Baal, or perhaps is none less than El himself, the “Lord of the Mansion of Heaven”, (Baalzebul) and it seems that worshippers of this baal allied with worshippers of Abimelech and they attack the city at dawn, the time when Mithras was worshipped. The shadows of the mountains, as the sun rises, seem to attack Gaal, and the rival god is driven out.
Note the mysterious unknown place “Arumah” in Judges 9:31,41, which is “Tormah” in the Hebrew bible, and probably the Hormah of Judges 1:17. In Hebrew, the letters “t” and “h” are easily mistaken if the scribe is careless, and a leading “a” is simply a glottal stop or unaspirated “h” as in the English “hour”, so “Hormah” (“Arumah”) and “Tormah” are recognizably the same, and are suspiciously like Ahuramazda in this context. “Tormah” in Hebrew also sounds like a pun on the law of Moses, “Tohramohsha”. The word “Torah” was only used to mean “law” in the Persian period, and its supposed etymological derivation from the older word for “to cast” (as in casting runes for divine guidance) is invented to explain its sudden unexplained appearance.
For their apostasy, the people of Shechem were murdered and the city razed and sown with salt, as the Romans did to Carthage. Now a Tower of Shechem appears, apparently not in Shechem which has already been destroyed, unless the chronology is adrift. If these are legends based on internecine struggles in the earlier Persian period, the chronology would have been less important than the individual incidents. The tower was the stronghold of the “house” of El-berith, where “house” can mean the people of El-berith as in the “house of David”, or can mean the temple of El-berith. El-berith, as we have seen, means the “God of the Covenant!” Abimelech sets the tower on fire and burns the besiged inhabitants to death.
What is to be made of this confusion? If El-berith is the obvious God of the Covenant, Yehouah, either the people are being named from the time before they apostatized, or an incident in which the newly faithful to the imposed god were attacked by the Am ha Eretz has been re-written to reverse the incident. At a later date this would have been possible, especially after the end of Persian rule, because those who wrote the originals were long dead and the new Greek rulers were intent on harmonization. So this dastardly deed could have been first meant to signify a victory for the apostates over the followers of the God of the Covenant, and might have been the very reason why Shechem was so severely treated when the worshippers of Yehouah finally beat them. Finally, a similar seige of a tower in a town called Thebez leads to the death of Abimelech when a woman in the beseiged tower drops a grinding stone on his head. This is Abimelech’s punishment for killing his seventy brothers, but is doubtless added by the moralising editor, who does not want to anyone to see Abimelech as standing for Yehouah.
Note that in Mount Zalmon and the earlier Zalmunna, who was killed by Gideon, we have another Canaanite god, Shalmi, the evening sun or star, doubtless shown here as defeated by Yehouah and forced to His assistance.
Shamir in Judges 10:1-2 might be the original Samson, of whom nothing was known but who was represented as Hercules under Greek influence. If the place means anything, it is a reference to Samaria, on this biblical chronology, at least 200 years before it was founded. In reality, these stories were written at least 400 years after Samaria was founded.
Jephthah
Now, the people of Abarnahara, the Hebrews, before the Persians came were child sacrificers. In the modern day we take the moral high ground in respect of the proper treatment of children, but we are utterly hypocritical about it. In the last century, we had families that were far too big, that could not be properly supported by the wage earner and so lived for most of their childhood in abject poverty and misery, often having to work 12 hours a day for a shilling when an adult would get eight, sa barely easing their pauperism. This was God’s intention, the bishops said.
Even today, there is little or no thought given to the millions who remain in poverty in the Third World, and our Christian leaders even think it necessary to bomb them sometimes to keep them in their place. Needless to say, children are in the firing line, but they are not our kids, they are not Christian kids, so it does not matter. Yet the people who have such uncaring views on the practical value of childhood, shudder at the thought that the Romans exposed unwanted infants to the cold night and the wolves, so that their families would not get too big, and the children who grew to consciousness did not have to starve.
The tophets of the Canaanites, might have had the same effect, incidental to the ultimately testing sacrifice parents were making to their gods. Poor families might have sacrificed their children in the hope of more of their god’s favour. And they got a little, because they had one mouth less to feed. The story of Jephthah the Gideonite, who sacrificed his daughter (Jg 11:30-34) for Yehouah’s aid in warfare, is a justification of Canaanite child sacrifice, barely altered into a warning against foolish promises to do such things. The priestly editor makes it a justification for a women’s festival (Jg 11:40) to replace the annual wailing of the death of Tammuz. Yet child sacrifices were prescribed in Exodus 22:29-30 when God demands:
The firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto Me. Likewise shalt thou do with thine oxen, and with thy sheep: seven days it shall be with his dam; on the eighth day thou shalt give it Me.
Ezekiel accepts that this was the correct interpretation and that the sacrifice was by fire, as it was for the Phœnicians, but he pretends that Yehouah did it out of pique because of the apostasy of the people!
Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord.
This, of course, refutes everthing that a Christian believes about God and yet comes from one of the holy prophets so must be true! Yet Jeremiah, obviously writing much later despite accepted biblical chronology, makes a point of refuting it as something Yehouah could never have even thought of, and tries to give the exact opposite impression:
For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the Lord: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it. And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind.
The third part of Isaiah, that no one denies is in the Persian period, neverthless tells us that the practice was continuing then:
Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood. Enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the clifts of rocks?
Circumcision, a practice long known to the Egyptians, and doubtless practiced from time to time and by certain people in Palestine, was declared obligatory as a replacement for the actual sacrifice of children. A notional castration would devote the child to God and no death was necessary. Circumcision was not a practice of the Persians but seems to have been accepted as the lesser of two evils. Better to lose a bit of superfluous skin than to be tossed to the flames of the Tophet.
We find many cross references to Exodus and Numbers suggesting that the editor was involved with the addition of the story of Moses to the bible. Equivalent glosses have been added to Deuteronomy 2. In Judges 10:6, the people again apostatize worshipping “Baalim and Ashtaroth, the gods of Syria, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the Gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines”. The places mentioned here are a perfect specification of the Persian province of Abarnahara, and a virtual confession that the people addressed are indeed the Hebrews, but the Hebrews are all of these people of Abarnahara, not just the Jews and Israelites. Thus the god being impressed is being impressed on the whole of the nations of Abarnahara, not just the hills of Palestine. Jerusalem was the temple state of this province, to which all the people were to look, and the Jews were the administrators of the temple state. When the Persian empire was conquered, this Persian plan could no longer be pursued and the Hebrew tradition was lost everywhere except in its centre, Jerusalem.
Lionel Curtis in Civitas Dei: the Commonwealth of God (1938) has noted:
In the earlier records of Greece and Rome we meet the Phoenician traders everywhere scattered along the coasts of the Mediterranean. But after the fall of Carthage they seem to fade from the pages of history. Before the time of Caesar we meet the Jews in every part of the Graeco-Roman world, filling the place which the Phoenicians once occupied in the commercial life of the Mediterranean. Paul in his journeys finds a settlement of his countrymen in almost every city which he visits.
Carthage fell about the time of the Maccabees, and Jerusalem acquired the place of honour from which Tyre and Carthage had both fallen as the leading centre of Semitic civilisation, but the truth is that many Phœnicians were already Jews, if the word is given its correct meaning—worshippers of Yehouah. Is it merely a strange coincidence that one of the main “families” of Carthage was founded by a man called Mago who was a contemporary of Cyrus and Darius (550-500 BC)? The Persian kings had a secret service second to none. They were adepts at infiltrating and influencing powerful neighbours of the Persians. Mago seems likely to have been a Zoroastrian, and only a few decades later, Jerusalem was set up as the temple state of Abarnahara. From then on Phœnicians in Asia would have been converting to the worship of Yehouah and it is inconceivable that they did not influence many Phœnicians elsewhere. So, with the loss of the main city of the Canaanites in north Africa, the Phœnicians will surely have looked to Jerusalem, and those who had remained loyal to Tanis and Melkart will have turned to Yehouah.
God rejects the people utterly, promising that he would save them no more (Jg 10:13). The translators of the Jewish scriptures do not like to use the word “save” in connection with god because that is reserved for His Son. So, the Old Testament God always “delivers” or just “helps” his people escape from their enemies. The word is the same as that one from which “hosannah”, “Essene” and “Jesus” (Joshua) derive—osea.
Anyway, the Israelites put away their foreign gods and Yehouah took pity on them again. The saviour he sent here was Jephthah, who had been rejected by his people to become an bandit in the land of Tob (Good), and whose mother was a harlot! The Tobit of the Apocrypha lived in Medea near the Zoroastrian holy city of Rhages! Jephthah means “He Opens” or “Yehouah Opens”, the “Opener” being an ancient name or title of God. Jephthah is not an Israelite, he is a Gileadite from east of the Jordan, so here again we have a tradition from elsewhere in Abarnahara incorporated into the scriptures that were to be the Hebrew scriptures—for all the people of the Levant and Syria. In Judges 11:26, however, the East Bank is declared to have belonged to the Israelites for 300 years, even though the whole period from the supposed conquest, by Joshua, to the supposed kingdom of David is less than 200 years. If Omri founded Israel in the ninth century and laid claim to parts of the East Bank, as the Moabite stone confirms, then a setting for Judges in the fifth century is compatible with this claim.
